1. Field of the Invention
The present description generally relates to monitoring various aspects of casinos and gaming, and more specifically relates to automated game and wager tracking and analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
Casinos and other forms of gaming are a multi-billion dollar, world-wide industry. Typically, a customer exchanges currency or some form of credit for a casino's chips. The customer places the chips as wagers at various games, such as blackjack, craps, roulette, and baccarat. A game operator, such as a dealer, pays out winning wagers with additional chips based on the set of odds for the particular game. The dealer collects the customer's chips for losing wagers. The odds of each game slightly favor the casino, so on average the casino wins and is profitable.
Like many businesses, casinos wish to understand the habits of their customers. Some casinos have employees visually observe customer's game play, manually tracking the gaming and wagering habits of the particular customers. For example, “pit managers” often visually monitors and records the live play of a game at the gaming table. Based on this visual monitoring, the pit managers try to guess what people are betting, and based on such betting the casino provides rewards to the customer in the form of complementary benefits, or “comps.”
The inventors have empirically determined that having human pit managers manually monitor and estimate customers' wagering habits is very inaccurate. For instance, in one recent study the inventors found accuracy of the human pit managers to vary widely, all the way from 30% accuracy up to 90%. In addition, the current method of using human pit managers to monitor customers' gaming activities is extremely labor intensive for the casinos.
Like many businesses, casinos wish to prevent their customers from cheating. The fast pace and large sums of money make casinos likely targets for cheating and stealing. In one commonly known method of cheating the casino, players count cards in games of blackjack (which the casinos view as cheating), and increase their wagers in lockstep with the increasing probability of a winning hand based on the card counting.
Casinos employ a variety of security measures to discourage such cheating. One measure is to track both the hands played and wagers of a blackjack player to determine if the pattern of wagers plus hands played give rise to an inference that the player is counting cards. For example, surveillance cameras covering a gaming area or particular gaming table provide a live or taped video signal that security personnel closely examine. However, as with the pit managers, the accuracy of such counter-cheating measures suffers due to the inability to track the often rapidly changing wagers made during a game.
It is therefore apparent that a need exists in the art for a method and system that can accurately track wagers during gaming.